Signs of Poor Listening Skills

Regardless of how proficient you are in communication, you should always think “How good a listener I am?” Cheryl Hamilton explained that there are ways to spot signs about poor listening skills at work. In a remote setting, it is unlikely that people will tell you that you are a poor listener, so you have to constantly monitor these habits.

1. Breaking the Chain of Command

In a remote work setting, if you frequently ask repeated questions after your lead devised the instructions, that is a clear sign of poor listening. This breaking of the chain of command can be both frustrating for the leader and the employee. Likewise, this is also applicable to managers, if he has poor listening skills, this leaves the employee with no alternatives to carry out their work effectively (Horton, 1983). Furthermore, discontinuing a chain of commands and reminders to employees (vis-à-vis) is a recipe for miscommunications.

Scenario with Supervisors Breaking the Chain:

Andrei is temporarily taking the position of Melissa as a finance supervisor. Andrei and Melissa had worked for a long time. Andrei noticed that Melissa was confident enough of him about the familiarity of tasks in withdrawing approved funds from their company account. Recently, however, in a meeting with the Chief Executive Officer, Andrei was questioned why he was unaware of the signatory protocols in fund transfers. Obviously, Melissa explained that she had informed her team about the procedures in handling funds. She confronted Andrei that he should not bypass signatories as these are important in the company.

In the scenario, Andrei demonstrated the concept of breaking the chain of command because of poor listening skills.

2. Learning Important Events Too Late

If you keep missing out important events such as deadlines or meetings, it illustrates poor listening. The culprit for this is the insufficient time management and confirmation of tasks from your manager or colleagues. This is fairly common in a remote work since you rely on memos or notifications to remind your schedule.

To avoid this, you should sync your online calendar to your phone or any device that you frequently carry with you. Sometimes, it is also effective to have a few members of your team to remind you about your tasks. To reciprocate, do the same if they need reminders.

3. Sending Signal Flares

As an employee, you may notice that your manager may sometimes be putting fire during a work crisis. For the managers, they are exhibiting poor listening. Since most of you are working remotely, the best solution is to respond to the fires and tell your manager honestly and professionally about their errors and miscommunications. More often, you must pick up these indirect warnings while you can control it.

If you are managing a team, listen to your teammates. Remember that you hire competent people because of their expertise and them more experience in their field and discipline. If they give you a specific methodology that follows professionally, match those to your current process and agree on how you will make adjustments in your work settings.

Scenario:

Your manager messaged you saying ‘we may want to consider replacing the current video immediately’ despite the limited time. Alarmingly, as an employee, you find this frustrating because it will interrupt your current task and you followed the instructions carefully given by your superior. As an expert in the field, you emailed the issue professionally together with the other team and provided an alternative to meet a more realistic deadline. Encourage your manager to agree not sacrificing the quality of work you contribute to the company.

To prevent poor listening you must do the following methods:

1. Have the information repeated with sufficient details and make sure to keep notes or online reminders if you have difficulty remembering them.
2. Learn when to accept delegated tasks, this is risky for employees who will receive the task.
3. Increase written communications (notes, memos, emails, chat messages, etc.) or if needed have conversations screen-captured or recorded, so when signal flares happen you have enough evidence to douse it.

You can learn further about the causes of poor listening by watching the video below:

(VIDEO)